As examples of a reverse kind, but witnessing to the play of like beliefs in qualities passing from brutes and lifeless things, we find some races avoiding oil, lest the game slip through their fingers, abstaining from the flesh of deer, lest it engenders timidity, and from that of pigs and of tortoises lest the eater has very small eyes. Dr. Tylor gives an apposite illustration of a kindred superstition in the Hessian lad who thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl’s cap in his pocket as a symbolical way of repudiating manhood. So the thief of our London slums hopes to evade the police by carrying a piece of coal or slate in his pocket for luck. Among ourselves there was an old medical saw, “Hare-flesh engendereth melancholy bloude,” and in Swift’s Polite Conversation we have this reason assigned by Lady Answerall when asked to eat it; whilst faith is not yet extinct in the “Doctrine of Signatures,” or the notion that the appearance of a plant indicates the disease for which it is a remedy, as the “eye-bright,” the black purple spot on the corolla of which was said to show that it was good for weak eyes. In referring to the mandrake superstition (a plant whose roots are said to rudely resemble the human form) as illustration of the “recognised principles in magic that things like each other, however superficially, affect each other in a mystic way and possess identical properties,” Mr. Andrew Lang quotes a Melanesian belief that a stone in the shape of a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find, because it made pigs prolific and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots.[64]

Brand remarks[65] that the custom of giving infants coral to help in cutting the teeth is said to be a survival of an old belief in it as an amulet; and in English, Sicilian, and West Indian folk-lore, we find the belief that it changes colour in sympathy with the pale or healthy look of the wearer. An old Latin author says,[66] “It putteth of lightenynge, whirle-wynde, tempeste, and storms fro shyppes and houses that it is in.”

We are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old, and although our customs and beliefs have a far less venerable antiquity, their sources lie not less in primitive thought. Like the survival of the ancient Roman workman’s “casula” or “little house” or “shelter” in the chasuble of the priest; like the use of stone knives in circumcision long after the discovery of metals; the general tends to become special; the common, its primitive need or service forgotten, to become sacred. Sometimes the early idea abides; the Crees, who carry about the bones of the dead carefully wrapped up as a fetish; the Caribs, who think such relics can answer questions; the Xomanes, who drink the powdered bones in water, that they may receive the spirit; the Algonquins, whose god Manobozho turned bits of his own flesh or his wife’s into raccoons for food; the Iroquois cited above; represent the barbarous ancestry of higher races, whether of the Bacchanalians described by Arnobius,[67] who thought that the fulness of the divine majesty was imparted to them when they tore and ate the struggling rams with mouths dripping with gore, or of the faithful who receive nutriment through the symbols of the Cross. And the prayers of savage and civilised have this in common, that some advantage is thereby sought by the utterer; their sacrifices are alike the giving up of one’s goods or one’s self to a deity who may be appeased or bribed thereby; their fastings are cultivated as inducing the abnormal states in which their old men dream dreams and their young men see visions of spirits appearing as angels ascending and descending between earth and the abode of the blest. Baptisms are the ancient lustrations, which water, as the cleansing element, suggested; and the eastward position, over which priests and ecclesiastics have fought, is the undoubted relic of worship of the rising sun.

In short, there is no rite or ceremony yet practised and revered amongst us which is not the lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage, expressing a need which, were men less the slaves of custom and indolence, would long since have found loftier form than in genuflexion before shrine and reliquary. By an exercise of imagination not possible but for these being a felicitous “gesture language” of the cries of human souls, a mass of heathen and pagan rites have been transformed into those of the Christian faith. That they have come to be mistaken for the ideas symbolised, that with the loftiest spiritual teaching there should remain commingled belief in miraculous power in fragments (mostly spurious) of dead men and their clothes; only shows the persistency of that notion of a vital connection between the lifeless and the living which this section has sought to illustrate.

§ V.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS.

The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.

They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his surroundings. The phantasies which have defiled through the brain in coherent order, or danced in mazy whirl about its sinuous passages when complete sleep was lacking, leave their footprints on the memory, and they are strong of head and heart, true pepticians, like the countryman cited by Carlyle, who, “for his part, had no system,” whose composure on awaking is not affected by the harmonious or discordant, the pleasant or disagreeable, illusions which have made up their dreams. In the felicitous words of Lucretius, “When sleep has chained down our limbs in sweet slumber, and the whole body is sunk in profound repose, yet then we seem to ourselves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and amid the thick darkness of night we think we see the sun and the daylight; and though in a confined room, we seem to be passing to new climates, seas, rivers, mountains, and to be crossing plains on foot, and to hear voices, though the austere silence of night prevails all round, and to be uttering speech, though quite silent. Many are the other things of this marvellous sort we see, which all seek to shake, as it were, the credit of the senses: quite in vain, since the greatest part of these cases cheat us on account of the mental suppositions which we add of ourselves, taking those things as seen which have not been seen by the senses. For nothing is harder than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, which the mind without hesitation adds on of itself.”[68]

While for us dreams fill an empty moment in the telling, albeit now and again nurturing such remains of superstition as cling to the majority of people, they are to the untrained intelligence, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, or to follow any sequence of ideas, as solid as the experiences of waking moments. As a Zulu, well expressing the limits of savage thought, said to Bishop Callaway, “Our knowledge does not urge us to search out the roots of it, we do not try to see them, if any one thinks ever so little, he soon gives it up, and passes on to what he sees with his eyes; and he does not understand the real state of even what he sees.” Nor does his language clear the confusion within when he tells what he has seen and heard and felt, where he has been and what he has done, for the speech cannot transcend the thought, and therefore can represent neither to himself nor to his hearers the difference between the illusions of the night and the realities of the day. The dead relatives and friends who appear in dreams and live their old life, with whom he joins in the battle, the chase, and the feast, the foes with whom he struggles, the wild beasts from whom he flees, or in whose clutches he feels himself, and with shrieks awakens his squaw, the long distances he travels to sunnier climes lit by a light that never was on land or sea, are all real, and no “baseless fabric of a vision.” That now and again he should have walked in his sleep would confirm the seeming reality; still more so would the intensified form of dreaming called “nightmare,”[69] when hideous spectres sit upon the breast, stopping breath and paralysing motion, and to which is largely due the creation of the vast army of nocturnal demons that fill the folk-lore of the world, and that, under infinite variety of repellent form, have had place in the hierarchy of religions.

Dreams are in the main referred by the savage either to the entrance into him of some outside spirit, as among the Fijians, who believe that the spirit of a living man will leave the body to trouble sleeping folk, or to the real doings of himself.

When the Greenlander dreams of hunting, or fishing, or courting, he believes that the soul quits the body; the Dyaks of Borneo think that during sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body or travels far away, being endowed, whether present or absent, with conditions which in waking moments are lacking. Wherever we find a low state of mental development the like belief exists. In Mr. im Thurn’s elaborate work on the Indians of Guiana we have corroborative evidence, the more valuable because of its freshness. He tells us that the dreams which come to the Indian are to him as real as any of the events of his waking life. To him dream-acts and waking-acts differ only in one respect—namely, that the former are done only by the spirit, the latter are done by the spirit in its body. Seeing other men asleep, and afterwards hearing from them the things which they suppose themselves to have done when asleep, the Indian has no difficulty in reconciling that which he hears with the fact that the bodies of the sleepers were in his sight and motionless throughout the time of supposed action, because he never questions that the spirits, leaving the sleepers, played their part in dream-adventures. Mr. im Thurn illustrates the complete belief of the Indian in the unbroken continuity of his dream-life and waking-life by incidents which came under his own notice, and which are quoted as serving the present argument better than any theorising.

Taking an illustration from nearer home, although from a more remote time, we have in the Scandinavian Vatnsdæla Saga a curious account of three Finns who were shut up in a hut for three nights, and ordered by Ingimund, a Norwegian chief, to visit Iceland, and inform him of the line of the country where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, and they sent their souls on their errand, and, on their awaking at the end of three days, gave an accurate account of the Vatnsdæl, in which Ingimund ultimately dwelt. No wonder that in mediæval times, when witches swept the air and harried the cattle, swooning and other forms of insensibility were adduced in support of the theory of soul-absence, or that we find among savages—as the Tajals of the Luzon islands—objections to waking a sleeper lest the soul happens to be out of the body. As a corollary to this belief in soul-absence, fear arises lest it be prolonged to the peril of the owner, and hence a rough and ready theory of the cause of disease is framed, for savages rarely die in their beds.

§ VI.

BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE.

That disease is a derangement of functions interrupting their natural action, and carrying attendant pain as its indication, could not enter the head of the uncivilised: and, indeed, among ourselves a cold or a fever is commonly thought of as an entity in the body which has stolen in, and, having been caught, must be somehow expelled. With the universal primitive belief in spiritual agencies everywhere inhaled with the breath or swallowed with the food or drink, all diseases were regarded as their work, whether, as remarked above, through absence of the rightful spirit or subtle entrance of some hostile one. If these be the causes to which sicknesses are due, obviously the only cure is to get rid of them, and hence the sorcerer and the medicine-man find their services in request in casting out the demon by force, or enticing him by cajolery, or in bringing back the truant soul.

To the savage mind no other explanation of illness is possible than that it is due to the exit of one’s own spirit or to the intrusion of a stronger one, whether of revengeful man or animal. An old Dakota, whose son had sore eyes, said that nearly thirty years before, when the latter was a boy, he fastened a pin to a stick and speared a minnow with it, and it was strange that after so long a time the fish should come to seek revenge. When an Indian is attacked by any wild beast he believes that the avenging Kenaima has transferred his spirit to the animal which seizes him, and if he has even a toothache, of which more presently, then the Kenaima has insinuated himself in the shape of a worm. The tribal chief among the Brazilian natives acts as doctor, and when he visits the sick he asks what animal the patient has offended, and if no cure is effected, the convenient explanation is at hand that the right animal has not been found. At the death of Iron Arms, a noted North American Indian warrior, it was said that he died because the doctor made a mistake, thinking that a prairie-dog had entered him, when it was a mud-hen. In the weird mythology of the Finns the third daughter of the ruler of Tuonela, the underworld, sits on a rock rising from hell-river, beneath which the spirits of all diseases are shut up. As she whirls the rock round like a millstone the spirits escape and go on their torturing errand to mortals. The more abnormal and striking phases of disease manifest when a man is writhing under intense agony, as if torn and twisted by some fiendish living thing, or when in delirium he raves and starts, or when thrown down in epilepsy he struggles convulsively, or when he shivers in an ague, or when in more violent forms of madness he seems endowed with superhuman strength; the various symptoms attending hysteria; each and all support that theory of spirit-influence which survives among advanced races in referring disease to supernatural causes. For the ancient theories of a divine government under which disease is the expression of the anger of the gods, and medicine the token of their healing mercy, and the current notions that any epidemic or pestilence is a visitation of God, are identical in character, however improved in feature, with the barbaric belief illustrated above; and in the ages when belief in the devil as one walking to and fro upon the earth was rampant, he especially was regarded as bringer of both bane and antidote. “He may,” says an old writer, “inflict diseases, which is an effect he may occasion applicando activa passivis (by applying actives to passives), and by the same means he may likewise cure ... and not only may he cure diseases laid on by himself, as Wierus observes, but even natural diseases, since he knows the natural causes and the origin of even those better than the physicians can, who are not present when diseases are contracted, and who, being younger than he, must have less experience.”[71] In Lancashire folk-lore “casting out the ague” was but another name for “casting out the devil”; in the Arabic language the words for epilepsy and possession by demons are the same; and in such phrases as a man being “beside himself,” “transported,” “out of his mind,” or in the converse, as when it is said in the parable of the prodigal son, “he came to himself”; in the words “ecstasy,” which means a displacement or removal of the soul, and “catalepsy,” a seizing of the body by some external power, we have language preserving the primitive ideas of an intruding or departing spirit. Such minor actions as gaping and sneezing confirm the belief. The philosophy of the latter, as Mr. Gill remarks in his Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, is that the spirit having gone travelling about, its return to the body is naturally attended with some difficulty and excitement, occasioning a tingling and enlivening sensation all over the body. And the like explanation lies at the root of the mass of customs attendant on sneezing, and of the superstitions generated by it, which extend through the world.

Williams tells us that among the Fijians, when any one faints or dies, their spirit, it is said, may sometimes be brought back by calling after it, and occasionally the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying at full length and bawling out lustily for the return of his soul. So in China, when a child is lying dangerously ill, its mother will go outside into the garden and call its name, in the hope of bringing back the wandering spirit. But for all the ills that flesh is heir to, from hiccupping to madness, from toothache to broken limbs, the patient seldom dares to doctor himself; neither the etiquette of the ordained medicine-man nor the orthodox therapeutics favour that show of independence. The methods adopted by the faculty vary in detail, but they are ruled by a single assumption. When a Chinaman is dying, and the soul is believed to be already out of the body, a relative holds up his coat on a bamboo stick, and a Taoist priest seeks by incantations to bring back the truant soul so that it may re-enter the sick man. Among the Six Nations the Indians sought to discover the intruder by gathering a quantity of ashes and scattering them in the cabin where the sick person was lying. A similar recipe for tracking demons is given in the Talmud; but, as more nearly bearing on the Indian practice, a Polish custom mentioned by Grimm[72] may be quoted. When the white folk torment a sick man a friend walks round him carrying a sieveful of ashes on his back, and lets the ashes run out till the floor round the bed is covered with them. The next morning all the lines in the ashes are counted, and the result told to a wise woman, who prescribes accordingly.

A favourite mode of treatment is blowing upon or sucking the diseased organ, and deception is no infrequent resort when the sorcerer secretes thorns or fishbones, beetles or worms, in his mouth, and then pretends that he has extracted them. Cranz says that the Eskimo old women appear to suck from a swollen leg scraps of leather or a parcel of hair which they have previously crammed into their mouths, and in Australia the same dodge is practised, when the sorcerer makes believe that he has drawn out a piece of bone from the affected part. That toothache is due to a worm is a belief which exists throughout Europe and Asia, and from the Orkneys to New Zealand. Shakspere refers to it in Much Ado about Nothing, Act III. Scene ii.—

Don Pedro. What! sigh for the toothache?

Leonata. Where is but a humour or a worm;

and instances are current of this superstition being acted upon in rural districts, whilst in China the itinerant dentist conceals a worm in the stick which he applies to the aching tooth, and on the stick being gently tapped, the worm wriggles out to the satisfaction of the sufferer. But among barbaric races the treatment of disease is ordinarily the reverse of soothing. Here and there the virtues of some plant have been discovered by accident, and, whilst exalted into a deity in its native home, it has become, like cinchona, a priceless boon to the fever-stricken all over the world; but, speaking broadly, the medicine-man is no Melampus, winning the secret of their healing balm from herb and tree. Nor has he much faith in magic or charm compared to his faith in noise, in incantations, with their accompanying hideous grimaces and gestures, and their deafening yells with clang of instrument to drown the sufferer’s groans and chase away the demon. Not unfrequently, when the patient is kept without food so as to starve out the indwelling enemy, or when the body is pommelled and squeezed to force him out, the remedy helps the disease! An illustration or two from a great mass at command must suffice. Among the Mapuches the sorcerer adopts the canonical howls and grimaces. Making himself as horrible-looking as he can, he begins beating a drum and working himself into a frenzy until he falls to the ground with his breast working convulsively. As soon as he falls, a number of young men outside the hut, who are there to help him in frightening the disease-bringing spirit out of the patient, add their defiant yells, and dash at full speed, with lighted torches, against the hut. If this does not succeed, and the patient dies, the result is attributed to witchcraft. When a Pawnee chief had some ribs and an arm broken, the medicine-men danced round him, and raised their voices from murmurous chants to howls, accompanying the music by blows upon the wounded man’s breast to banish the bad spirit. In olden time this rough-and-tumble business of blows, to which immersion was added, was applied to lunatics in these islands. And, in fact, until some local paper narrates a current superstition, we seldom awaken to the fact how widely the theological explanation of diseases and the empirical choice of remedies still obtains, each being survivals of barbaric theory and practice.

The savage who has more faith, as a curative, in plants that grow on burial-places, and the Christian, who ascribed special healing power to turf and dew from a saint’s grave,[73] differ no whit in kind; and so ingrained was the medicinal belief in virtue inhering in fragments of the dead, that not even the satire of “Reynard the Fox,” telling how the wolf was cured of his earache, and the hare of his fever, the moment that they lay down on the grave of the martyred hen, could give quietus to the notion that grated skulls and sacramental shillings were specifics for the healing of the faithful.

This reference to like practices reminds us how belief in the action of invisible agencies has passed into the practice of confession among advanced races outside Christendom, as in Mexico and Peru. The Roman Catholic priests were not less astonished at finding this in vogue on their arrival in South America than the good Father Huc when, on reaching Tibet, he found shaven monks wearing rosaries, worshipping relics, using holy water, and a grand Lama decked in mitre, cope, and cross.[74] But, as the Italian proverb has it, the world is one country, and “we have all one human heart,” so that the confessional has the like explanation in east as in west. If the disease be the work of an offended deity or of an avenging spirit, let the wrong-doer admit his fault, and trust to him who is credited with influence with the unseen to exorcise the intruder.

§ VII.

BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL.

In thus far illustrating the confusion inherent in the barbaric mind between what is and what is not external to itself, the explanation given of matters still dividing philosophers into opposite camps has been hardly indicated. The uniformity of this confusion among the lower intelligence in every zone and age might surprise us, and we should be in bondage to the theory which explains it by assumption of primal intuitions of the race, were we not rejoicing in the freedom of the truth of the doctrine of the descent, or ascent, of man from an ape-like ancestry, and the resulting slow development of his psychical faculties, involving his accounting for motion in things around by the like personal life and will of which he is conscious in himself, and for his regarding the world of great and small alike as the home and haunt of spirits.

For the assumption underlying the savage explanation of such things as dreams and diseases involves a larger assumption—namely, that the spirit which acts thus arbitrarily, playing this game of hide-and-seek, now, as it were, caught up into Paradise, and now dodging its owner and worrying its enemy on earth—is, to quote Mr. Spencer’s appropriate term, a man’s other self. It is, at least, what the scientists call a working hypothesis; it is the only possible explanation which the uncultivated mind can give of what it has not the power to see is a subjective phenomenon. Odd and out-of-the-way events have happened to the dreamer; he has been to strange places and seen strange doings, but waking up, he knows that he is in the same wigwam where he laid down to sleep, and can be convinced by his squaw that he has not moved therefrom all night. Therefore it is the other self, this phantom-soul, which has been away for a time, seeing and taking part in things both new and old. We civilised folk, as Dr. Wendell Holmes remarks, not rarely find our personality doubled in our dreams, and do battle with ourselves, unconscious that we are our own antagonists. Dr. Johnson dreamed that he had a contest with an opponent and got the worst of it; of course, he found the argument for both! Tartini heard the devil play a wonderful sonata, and lay entranced by the arch-fiend’s execution. On waking he seized his violin, and although he could not reproduce the actual succession of notes, he recovered sufficient impressions to compose his celebrated “Devil’s Sonata.” Obviously the devil was no other than Tartini.

Thus the philosopher, to whom dreaming merely indicates a certain amount of uncontrolled mental activity, may satisfy himself; not thus can the savage, who cannot even think that he thinks, and to whom the phenomena of shadows, reflection, and echoes bring confirming evidence of the existence of his mysterious double. What else than a veritable entity can his shadow be to him? Its intangibility feeds his awe and wonder, and increases his bewilderment; its actions, ever corresponding with his own, make it, even more than its outline, a part of himself, the loss of which may be serious. Only when the light is withdrawn or intercepted does the shadow cease to accompany, precede, or follow him, and to lengthen, shorten, or distort itself; whilst not he alone, but all things above and around, have this phantom attendant. The Choctaws believed that each man has an outside shadow, shilombish, and an inside shadow, shilup, both of which survive his decease. Among the Fijians a man’s shadow is called the dark spirit, which goes to the unseen world, while the other spirit, which is his likeness reflected in water or a mirror, stays near the place where he dies. The Basutos are careful, when walking by a river, not to let their shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and harm the owner. Among the Algonquin Indians sickness is accounted for by the patient’s shadow being unsettled or detached from the body; the Zulus say that a corpse cannot cast a shadow, and in the barbaric belief that its loss is baleful, we have the germ of the mediæval legends of shadowless men and of tales of which Chamisso’s story of Peter Schlemihl is a type. The New England tribes called the soul chemung, the shadow, and in the Quiche and Eskimo languages, as also in the several dialects of Costa Rica, the same word expresses both ideas; while civilised speech indicates community of thought in the skia of the Greeks, the manes or umbra of the Romans, and the shade of our own tongue. Still more complete in the mimicry is the reflection of the body in water or mirror, the image repeating every gesture and adopting every colour, whilst in the echoes which forest and hillside fling back, the savage hears confirmation of his belief in the other self, as well as in the nearness of the spirits of the dead. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and nooks of the cliffs, and that the echoes are their voices, and in South Pacific myth echo is the first and parent fairy, to whom at Marquesas divine honours are still paid as the giver of food, and as she who “speaks to the worshippers out of the rocks.” In Greek myth she is punished by Juno for diverting her attention whilst Jupiter flirts with the nymphs, and at last, pining in grief at her unrequited love for Narcissus, there remains nothing but her voice.

But what, in primitive conception, is the more specific nature of the other self, and how does it make the passage from within to without, and vice versâ? Very early in man’s history he must have wondered at the difference between a waking and a sleeping person, a living and a dead one, and sought wherein this consisted. There lay the body in the repose, more or less broken, of sleep, or in the undisturbed repose of the unawakening sleep; in the latter case, with nothing tangible or visible gone, but that which was once “quick” and warm, which had spoken, moved, smiled, or frowned but a little while before, and which still came in dream or vision, was now cold and still.

It should here be remarked, in passing, that many savage races do not believe in death as a natural event, but regard it as differing from sleep only in the length of time that the spirit is absent from the body. No matter what any one’s age may be, if his death is not caused by wounds, it is attributed to magic, and the search for the sorcerer becomes a family duty, like the vendetta for other injuries. The widespread myths which account for death have as their underlying idea the infraction of some law or custom, for which the offender pays the extreme penalty. And that personification of it which pervades barbaric thought, whilst undergoing many changes of form, yet retains its hold in popular conception as well as in poetry. Pictured as the messenger of Deity, as the awful angel who sought the rebellious and impious, or who, in mission of tenderness, bore the soul to its home in the bosom of the Eternal, it was transformed and degraded by the grotesque fancy of a later time into a grim and dancing skeleton whetting his sickle for ingathering of the young and fair to their doom, or into the grinning skull and crossbones of Christian headstones. So when the maiden Proserpine is plucking the spring flowers, “crocuses and roses and fair violets,” in the Elysian fields, Hades, regent of hell, regardless of her cries, carries her off to his invisible realm.

But to resume. Whilst shadows, reflections, and echoes, one and all, seemed to satisfy the uncivilised mind as to the existence of the other self, they gave no key to its nature, to what it is like. Obviously the difference between death and life lay in some unsubstantial or semi-substantial thing. Perhaps, thought some races, it lies in the blood, with the unchecked outflow of which death ensues, and the idea of this connection has not been confined to barbaric peoples. Perhaps, thought other races, it lies in the heart, which, say the Basutos, has gone out of any one dead, but has returned when the sick have recovered. Among the Greeks some philosophers held that it was fire, which was extinct when the fuel of life was burnt out, or water, which would evaporate away. But, as language shows, it is with the breath that the other self of the savage and the vital principle of the philosopher has been most widely identified. For it is the cessation of breathing which would in the long-run be noted as the unfailing accompaniment of death; and the condensing vapour, as it was exhaled, would confirm the existing theories of a shadowy and gaseous-like soul. In this, as the illustrations to be adduced from various languages will evidence, the continuity of idea which travels along the whole line of barbaric and learned speculation is unbroken.

§ VIII.

BARBARIC PHILOSOPHY IN “PUNCHKIN” AND ALLIED STORIES.

As bearing upon the barbaric belief in the soul leaving the body at pleasure, there is a remarkable group of stories, the central idea of which is the dwelling apart of the soul or heart, as the seat of life, in some secret place, in an egg, or a necklace, or a flower, the good or evil fortunes of the soul involving those of the body. To this group the name of “Punchkin,” the title of one of the older specimens, may conveniently be given. In Miss Frere’s Old Deccan Days it takes the following form.

A Rajah has seven daughters, and his wife dying when they were quite children, he marries the widow of his prime minister. Her cruelty to his children made them run off to a jungle, where seven neighbouring princes, who were out hunting, found them, and each took one of them to wife. After a time they again went hunting, and did not come back. So when the son of the youngest princess, who had also been enchanted away, grew up, he set out in search of his mother and father and uncles, and at last discovered that the seven princes had been turned into stone by the magician Punchkin, who had shut up the princess in a tower because she would not marry him. Recognising her son, she plotted with him to feign agreement to marry Punchkin if he would tell her where the secret of his life was hidden. Overjoyed at her yielding to his wish, the magician told her that it was true that he was not as others.

The princess told her son this, and he set forth on his journey. On the way he rescued some young eagles from a serpent, and the grateful birds carried him until they reached the jungle, where, the genii being overcome with sleep by the heat, the eaglets swooped down. “Down jumped the prince; in an instant he had overthrown the chattees full of water and seized the parrot, which he rolled up in his cloak,” then mounted again into the air and was carried back to Punchkin’s palace. Punchkin was dismayed to see the parrot in the prince’s hands, and asked him to name any price he willed for it, whereupon the prince demanded the restoration of his father and his uncles to life. This was done; then he insisted on Punchkin doing the like to “all whom he had thus imprisoned,” when, at the waving of the magician’s wand, the whole garden became suddenly alive.

“Give me my parrot!” cried Punchkin. Then the boy took hold of the parrot, and tore off one of his wings; and as he did so the magician’s right arm fell off. He then pulled off the parrot’s second wing, and Punchkin’s left arm fell off; then he pulled off the bird’s legs, and down fell the magician’s right leg and left leg. Nothing remained of him save the limbless body and the head; but still he rolled his eyes, and cried, “Give me my parrot!” “Take your parrot, then,” cried the boy, and with that he wrung the bird’s neck, and threw it at the magician, and as he did so, Punchkin’s head twisted round, and, with a fearful groan, he died. Of course, all the rest “lived very happily ever afterwards,” as they do in the plays and the novels.

In the stories of Chundum Rajah, and of Sodewa Bai, the Hindu Cinderella, the heroine’s soul is contained in a string of golden beads. When the Ranee, jealous of her husband’s love for Sodewa Bai, asked her why she always wore the same beads, she replies: “I was born with them round my neck, and the wise men told my father and mother that they contained my soul, and that if any one else wore them I should die.” Whereupon the Ranee instructed her servant to steal the beads from the princess when she slept; then she died, but her body did not decay, and in the end she was restored to life by the recovery of her necklace. In the Bengali tale, Life’s Secret, a Rajah’s favourite wife gives birth miraculously to a boy, whose soul is bound up in a necklace in the stomach of a boal-fish. In both instances the ornaments are stolen, and while they are worn by the thieves, prince and princess alike are lifeless, whilst with the recovery of the beads life returned to each. A not unlike idea occurs in the story, Truth’s Triumph. The children of a village beauty, whom the Rajah had married, are changed into mango trees, to save them from the fury of the jealous Ranee, until the time of danger was past.

In Miss Stokes’ collection of Indian Fairy Tales, we have variants corresponding more closely to Punchkin. In Brave Hirálálbásá, a Rakshas (the common name for demon) is induced to reveal the secret of his life. He says, “Sixteen miles from here is a tree, round it are tigers and bears and other animals, on the top of it is a large flat snake, on the head of which is a bird in a cage, and my soul is in that bird.” By enchantment Hirálálbásá reached the tree and secured the cage. He pulled the bird’s limbs off, and the Rakshas’ arms and legs fell off; then he wrung its neck, and the Rakshas fell dead. And in the tale of The Demon and the King’s Son, from the same collection, the prince falls in love with the monster’s daughter, who is dead during the day and alive in the night. The prince asks what she would do, if whilst she is dead, her father were to be killed? She tells him it is impossible for any one to kill her father, for his life is in a mainá (starling), which is in a nest in a tree on the other side of the sea, and if, she adds, any one in killing the bird spilt the blood on the ground, a hundred demons would be born from it. The prince reached the other side, and taking the mainá, proceeded to kill it, but first wrapt it in his handkerchief, that no blood might be spilt. The demon, who was far away, knew that the bird was caught, and he set out at once to avert his doom. The story ends, like the preceding one, with the dismemberment of the bird, and the consequent death of the demon.

The nearest approach to tales similar to these in the Buddhist Birth-stories, is in one or two isolated cases, when the Karma of a human being is spoken of as immediately transferred to an animal.

In Tales from the Norse the one in most striking correspondence with the Punchkin group is that of The giant who had no heart in his body. The monster turns six princes and their wives into stone, whereupon the seventh and only surviving son, Boots, sets out to avenge their fate. On his journey he saves the lives of a raven, a salmon, and a wolf, and the wolf, having eaten his horse, compensates Boots by carrying him to the giant’s castle, where the lovely princess who is to be his bride is confined. She promises to find out where the giant keeps his heart, and by blandishments and divers arts known to the fair sex both before and since the time of Delilah, she worms out the secret. He tells her that “far, far away in a lake lies an island; on that island stands a church; in that church is a well; in that well swims a duck; in that duck is an egg; and in that egg lies my heart, you darling!” Boots, taking fond farewell of the princess, rides on the wolf’s back to the island. Then the raven he had befriended flies to the steeple and fetches the key of the church; the salmon, in like return for kindness, brings him the egg from the well where the duck had dropped it.